Inclusive Collections, Inclusive Libraries is an RLUK programme of events that aims to foster conversation around decolonisation and inclusive practice in collecting, describing, presenting, and engaging with content in research library collections. It seeks to raise awareness about the opportunities and challenges of dealing with, contextualising, and engaging with offensive collections while also identifying and sharing examples of
The Internet of Musical Events: Co-designing for Participation, Inclusion and the Ephemeral in Three Community Digital Archiving Projects
2 April 2025, 14:00 – 15:00 (BST), 15:00 – 16:00 (SAST/CEST), 16:00 – 17:00 (EEST), 09:00 – 10:00 (EDT), 06:00 – 07:00 (PST), 21:00 – 22:00(CST/AWST)
Musical events, though vibrant expressions of culture and identity, are the epitome of the ephemeral – performances literally disappear into thin air, particularly so in the period before recordings. But the collation and digitisation of surviving concert programmes, bills, and newspaper notices, for example, can yield data that get us some way towards understanding and re-experiencing them, as well as enabling us to analyse patterns and changes in performance cultures over time.
High-street music venues – a key component of live performances – have become increasingly transitory in recent years, with public responses to closures highlighting their connectedness to place and communities. Once a venue no longer provides a regular time and place to meet, its communities disperse and become more virtual and imagined than real (in conventional terms) although drawn back to it just as strongly by the affective power of memories and shared experiences. In these circumstances it can be extremely challenging to try to (re)capture the intangible elements that defined lost venues for their patrons.
This presentation will explore different approaches to these challenges of ephemerality, as demonstrated in three of their current research projects. The InterMusE project, or The Internet of Musical Events: Digital Scholarship, Community, and the Archiving of Performance (AHRC), centres on a co-created community digital archive in which data-rich collections of highly formulaic homogeneous documents (such as concert programmes) can be combined with related but extremely heterogeneous groups of documents and artefacts (other forms of musical ephemera). Our Place is a DIY digital-archiving toolkit developed collaboratively for use by venue managers, owners and their patrons. And the Willow Community Digital Archive, part of the UKCRF- and HEIF-funded StreetLife project developed in partnership with the City of York Council, is a co-created community archive celebrating The Willow, a family-run Cantonese restaurant-cum-nightclub located in York’s Coney Street that closed abruptly after forty years in 2015. Technical work developing the archives at the heart of the first and third projects centres around the deployment of a general-purpose digital library framework, and we also provide details on some initial experiments with ChatGPT, investigating its potential to encourage new visitors to the archive to engage in narrative-building, and inspire further community contributions particularly in the form of memories and recollections.